Mole Hunter And Mole, Both Gone

THOUGHTS & OBSERVATIONS

By the time I met James Jesus Angleton in the early 1980s, he was a discredited figure, a stooped, ashen-faced man left to tend to the orchids he loved and the conspiracy theories he could not let go.

During his heyday as head of counterintelligence at the CIA he terrorized the organization in a ceaseless search for Russian spies. In the world of counterintelligence, where nothing is assumed to be as it seems and everyone is presumed capable of betrayal, Angleton saw treason at every turn. He would tell me darkly of plots and deceptions that made the mind reel.

I think of Angleton these days as I read of the real and devastating betrayal of Aldrich Ames. Nothing Angleton ever conjured came close to the treachery of Ames, who for 10 years sold Moscow nearly every secret about U.S. espionage activities in Russia.

With his help, the KGB insinuated volumes of false information into the U.S. intelligence-gathering system, some of it reaching the president and some of it influencing U.S. defense spending and foreign policy decisions.

There is a cruelly ironic connection between the two men. They were both obsessed with deception, and in the end deception devoured them both, and with them, the CIA.

I do not know whether they ever met, and Angleton had long since retired by the time Ames began his association with the KGB, but their story is the story of the failure of the CIA.

Angleton, the mole hunter, and Ames, the mole, burrowed so deep into the recesses of American intelligence that they reached a lightless place where one man's effort to protect secrets and another man's effort to destroy them seemed barely distinguishable because both gravely damaged the CIA.

Angleton and Ames, for reasons that could not have been more different, arrested the central work of the CIA, the collection and analysis of information about the Soviet Union. For the better part of four decades beginning in the 1950s, during some of the most critical periods of the cold war, they twisted the agency into knots that have yet to be completely untied.

Angleton, in his relentless pursuit of Soviet agents, questioned the loyalty of many of the agency's best analysts of Soviet affairs, and ruined the careers of more than a few. The CIA only recently completed the painful business of restoring the reputation of those Angleton besmirched.

During Angleton's tenure as chief of counterintelligence from 1954-74, the CIA's ability to decipher the politics and military strategy of the Soviet Union was often crippled by his byzantine investigations.

Oddly, Angleton insisted that he never suspected Kim Philby, the British intelligence officer who provided Moscow with a stream of British and American secrets while a friend and close associate of Angleton.

In 1985, as the CIA was recovering from the damage done by Angleton, Ames went to work for the KGB. The most recent agency damage report makes clear that his betrayal essentially electrocuted the same CIA core operations that Angleton had scarred.

America's real spies inside the Soviet Union were unmasked by Ames, and they were replaced or manipulated by the KGB. As misleading information spiraled into the agency from sources controlled by Moscow, CIA analysts and executives passed it up the line to policy makers without any disclaimers, even in cases where the sources were suspect. It would be hard to imagine a more effective way to incapacitate the CIA and blind the American government.

The maze was so intricate the CIA is still trying to chart it. Chances are it never will find all the dead ends or the real exit. Only two men could create such a maze. Angleton is dead. Ames is in prison for the rest of his life.

The author is a columnist for The New York Times, 229 W. 43rd St., New York, N.Y. 10036.